I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising lately for paint recycling. The ads are asking people to turn in old cans of house paint they have sitting around their houses.
I’m in favor with the idea of recycling old house paint but I’m wondering where this campaign started. Has there been some recent development that lets companies turn old house paint into a sellable product? Is there a recent government program that’s funding organizations that recycle old paint? It seems to me advertisements wouldn’t be pushing this if there wasn’t some money in it somewhere.
What’s happening to this old paint after people turn it in?
Is this just a thing in New York? Are people seeing these ads in other states?
Years ago I saw a piece on a city paint collection site (I don’t think it was Dirty Jobs but it was something like that…maybe Huell Howser). There were only a couple collection tanks (oil and water based, maybe); color did not matter The whole mess (a sort of off-white) would be churned and used to paint things like city benches and playground equipment.
I’m assuming there has always been some capacity to get rid of old cans of house paint. It just seems strange to me that apparently there is now somebody who is willing to pay for advertisements asking people to recycle old paint. This suggests to me that there has been some recent change in the economics.
My county has collected old paint for several years. The county runs a household hazardous waste collection facility where they take all kinds of hazards, eg fertilizer, batteries, unlabeled household chemicals, etc. IIRC, they’ll take cans of partially used paint and just put them on the shelf to give away to people who may need a small amount of paint. They actually have a ‘paint room’, IIRC.
IIRC, Dirty Jobs did do an episode about paint recycling, although maybe that isn’t what you saw. People dropped off their old paint cans, they got dumped into one of three tanks: one for “warm” colors, one for “cool” colors, and one for “whites”. I remember that Mike apparently didn’t pay attention in art class and had no idea which colors were warm vs. cool. The tanks then got stirred up, and IIRC the stuff in the “cool” tank produced a sort of lavender color, the “warm” tank came out a sort of pale orange, and of course the “white” tank came out a sort of off white. Anyone in the city could come by and get free paint, as long as they didn’t mind one of those three colors.
And then there are the household hazardous waste collection programs like @ricepad mentioned, which accept paint among other things that can’t go in a landfill. I’m not sure if paint sent there actually gets recycled, or just disposed of in a safe manner.
Maybe your city is just trying to make a public outreach push to educate people about the program. That’s not all that uncommon.
Basically a few years ago New York started a paint recycling program where a fee is charged on each container of new paint sold ($1 or so a gallon) and there is a nonprofit organization called Paintcare which handles the recycling and is putting out the ads.
There’s also a huge difference between water-based latex paints and all the oil-based paints.
The latter are a hazmat mess. The former can generally be left open to dry into a rubber brick then be put in ordinary trash → landfill. Home depit, etc. sell a packaged granular product to speed that along.
If you go to your local paint store like Sherwin Williams, etc., it’s likely that they will dispose of used paint for you. I used to do that in Portland.
Holy shit! Do you know how many storm drains in Florida empty directly into a body of water? I’m not sure why, but those are labeled something like No dumping; empties into watershed, like the other kind are OK to deposit your old engine oil into.
You don’t remember the 1950s and 60s then. Every kid who learned how to drive learned how to change their car’s oil, and learned that the fastest, easiest way to get rid of the old oil was to dump it down the sewer.